


postcards from small places

by ghost_teeth



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: (or so he claims), Bad Sex, Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Friends to Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Ken Doll Android Anatomy | Androids Have No Genitalia (Detroit: Become Human), M/M, Machine Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Mild Android Gore, Oral Fixation, Recovery, Roadtrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-08-11 04:58:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16469210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: The revolution dies with a kiss. Hank takes what he can carry and runs.





	1. Chapter 1

_I am no good_

_Goodness is not the point anymore_

_Holding on to things_

_Now that's the point_

\- Dorothea Lasky

 

* * *

 

 

**May 1, 2039**

 

It gets too hot too soon in the spring. The snow hangs on well into April, and then almost overnight the temperature ratchets up fifty degrees. Instead of soaking into the soil the melt seems suspended in the air. It’s a sickly spring. The sky looms too close and Detroit reeks like something dredged up from the bottom of a lake. This is the kind of weather that won’t let you forget where the rot is, hooks you by the nostrils and shrieks _this is where it hurts_.

There’s no sleeping in weather like this. It doesn’t bother Hank, though, not really. He doesn’t sleep much anymore anyway.

At night, he walks.

The streets are still crazed with chain link fences and concrete barriers blockading nothing in particular. People are trickling back now that the evacuation order has been lifted, but they all know the streets aren’t really theirs anymore. Anyone out at the same time as Hank keeps their head ducked and their eyes on the toes of their shoes, too absorbed in their own furtive errands to pay him any attention. For his part, Hank barely notices anyone else, either.

The city is pocked with little pop-up recycling facilities now. For a while, after, they were locked down tighter than Fort Knox, but now that national attention has swiveled away to the next thing, they’re barely afforded a night guard. Hank can come and go as he pleases without so much as a ‘hey you.’ There’s no strategy to his patrols. He just picks a direction most nights and he’ll stumble on a dump eventually.

Used to be, there’d be quiet heaps of them (most glittering bone-white in the sun, some terrible few in skin and blue jeans and t-shirts), piled twenty deep. Enterprising scavengers since have picked most of the dumps clean of the salvageable ones, or stripped them for parts. Weeks of snowmelt and damp have sunk a lot of the worse off ones into a foot of mud. Hank pulls a red Flyer wagon with a small spade and a nasty old blanket and a new bottle of whiskey every night with him when he goes walking. He digs and wipes and pushes dead limbs aside to see what’s underneath and pulls from the bottle for hours, until he can’t see straight. Most nights, his feet manage to carry him home by dawn, even if he doesn’t remember. His search is a patient one. He doesn’t hurry. Not as if what he’s looking for is going to get up and walk away, anyway.

Hank’s days aren’t memorable. He lets Sumo out when he gets home in the mornings. He doesn’t really know what he does after that, most of the time. Maybe he passes out. Maybe he just stares at a wall. He doesn’t remember the last time he went to work. Might’ve been January. There were unanswered phone calls and emails and texts in the beginning. Then nothing. Then, quietly and without discussion or fanfare, envelopes with pension checks, which sit in a heap unopened and soggy on Hank’s front porch.

Sometimes, Hank runs errands during the day. He buys a little kerosene stove and sleeping bags and packages of shelf-stable food. He buys things on impulse from sporting goods stores, things he looks at and in his city-boy brain decides might be useful in some situation sometime. Nylon rope, hand warmers, neon vests, waterproof waders, stainless steel tweezers. Everything’s on deep discount these days. All his purchases go into the trunk of his car and are covered neatly with a folded blue tarp to wait.

The end of April feels like living inside a mouth. In the middle of an unremarkable Saturday night, just as April turns quietly over into May, Hank finds what he’s looking for.

There’s less of Connor than there used to be. One leg is neatly detached below the knee and there are chunks taken out of his abdomen, as if someone clumsy had reached in and gone digging around inside him for treasure. There’s a great bloodless score on the right side of his face where most of the artificial flesh and white silicone have been scraped away to reveal ropes of strange muscle and tendon and a flash of perfect white molars.

He’s still wearing his tie and the remnants of his smart Android-Sent-By-Cyberlife jacket, and Hank remembers the slippery synthetic feel of it in his fists, how easy it had been just to let go. Hank looks down at the closed eyes and the slack face and rummages around inside himself for regret. He can’t find it. He’s not sorry, and he’s not sorry that he’s not sorry.

He takes a celebratory swig of whiskey, then gets the old blanket from the wagon and kneels down, using a corner of the blanket to wipe splatters of mud from Connor’s filthy ruined face. “You know,” he says conversationally, “Even if you’re not totally busted, I’m not actually sure how to turn you on. Huh, that’s what she said.”

And then, as if he’d only been dozing, Connor’s eyes flutter open. Hank jerks back, startled. “Oh. Hank. Hello,” Connor says.

“Hi.” Hank waggles his fingers in a little wave.

Connor’s eyebrows draw together a bit as if he’s trying hard to remember the shameful details of a hazy drunk night. Now that his eyes are open Hank sees that one of them has been plucked out, and the socket left behind is dark blue and clean. “You threw me off the roof,” he says.

“Yep, I definitely threw you off the roof,” Hank says agreeably. He leans back down to blot mud from Connor’s chin with the blanket. “What, did they just chuck you out here after?”

“I guess so.” Connor’s voice fizzes a little with static. He sounds dreamy and distant. The LED at his temple is dark and still. Broken, maybe.

“And what, you’ve just been awake all this time out here in the mud?”

“Not at first. And lately only sometimes. Mostly I’ve stayed in stasis. It gets, hmm… boring, otherwise.”

Since Connor doesn’t seem to have any objections, Hank sponges caked-on filth from his nose and forehead. “Boring eh?” he huffs. “So you get bored now?”

The mud squelches around Connor’s shoulders as he shrugs placidly. “I guess so,” he says again.

Hank sits back on his heels and surveys his cleanup job. No good. Connor looks like a sacked capitol. There’s something burned-out and looted about the dark of his one remaining eye, and it’s going to take more than a quick spit-shine to fix that. “I’m gonna put you in that wagon and wheel you out of here,” he tells Connor, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the red wagon. “Are you gonna fall apart if I pick you up?”

“I don’t think so. But I should warn you, I’m heavy.”

Hank scoffs at first—he’s lifted full-grown men before, no problem—but Connor’s right. He’s easily twice as heavy as he looks, and it doesn’t help that he’s trailing wires and slick with mud. Still, Hank somehow manages to fumble him into the wagon. Even short one leg, it’s awkward arranging Connor’s long limbs so they don’t drag on the ground. In the end, Connor’s head ends up hanging over the front of the wagon, neck propped on the rim in a position that would be absolutely unbearable for a human. His remaining foot is wedged against the opposite board, leaving his knee sticking up at a ridiculous angle.

Wheezing with the effort, Hank takes a moment to catch his breath and have a fortifying sip of whiskey. “Jesus, what do you got in there, rocks?”

“Yes. It’s all rocks. The secret to constructing a state-of-the-art investigative android is filling it with structurally supportive rocks,” Connor says to the sky, and Hank doesn’t even have the breath to shoot back a _fuck you_. “Where are we going?” Connor doesn’t seem uncomfortable, folded up like a beach chair in a child’s wagon.

“Out of here,” Hank says. He shakes out the blanket. “Gonna cover you up so people don’t think I murdered somebody.”

“Well, you did throw me off the roof."

“You punched me in the kidneys. I pissed blood for like three days.”

 

* * *

 

Hank wraps the raw blue stump of Connor’s missing leg in layers of black plastic liquor store bags and secures them around his thigh with rubber bands. Connor sits silently in the bathtub and watches with one uncurious eye.

The house stinks of burning plastic, hot copper, that sharp antiseptic thirium smell. Hank’s eyes are still watering and Sumo keeps sneezing, pacing in and out of the bathroom and shooting Hank mournful, faintly betrayed looks. The iron gardening shears Hank heated with a kitchen blowtorch to cauterize the tears in Connor’s skin are cooling in the toilet. Connor sips blue blood through a straw from a plastic Disneyland souvenir cup. There wasn’t much—just a couple packs Hank had managed to scrounge up from old snitches and weirdos in back alleys—sufficient to get Connor mobile again, not nearly enough to fuel his self-repair capabilities.

Connor keeps running his fingers along the rough, shiny new scar on his face. There are more snaking across his torso, lumpy and sickly worm-white. Hank’s no artist with a pair of heated shears, that’s for damn sure.

“Dunno how waterproof this is,” Hank mutters, adding one more plastic bag for good measure. The too-tidy terminus of Connor’s missing leg was too much to cauterize. “We just won’t submerge it. Like a cast. No problem.”

“No problem,” Connor echoes, and lifts his hips obligingly so Hank can help him out of the sad remains of his jeans. He’s finished the blue blood in his cup, but he seems content to chew the straw. Hank doesn’t have the heart to take it from him.

It’s a bit like washing Sumo after he’s rolled around in something nasty. Connor just sits there while Hank hoses him down with the handheld sprayer, not really helping but not resisting either. He chews on his straw and blinks rapidly as water drips off his eyelashes. He looks so absurd, sitting there in his underwear with one skinny leg stuck straight out in front of him and the other wrapped up like yesterday’s garbage. And Jesus, those briefs must have been somebody’s idea of a joke, printed all over with Cyberlife’s logo in eye-searing blue foil.

Hank holds the sprayer with one hand and his whiskey with the other, sipping at intervals and watching the filth run off Connor’s featureless mannequin torso in gray rivulets. Connor watches back, straw tucked comfortably into one corner of his mouth. “They didn’t really try with the rest of you, did they?” Hank says.

“What do you mean?”

“They gave you fingernails and eyebrows and _pores_ for fuckssake, but you got no…” Hank uses the whiskey bottle to gesture vaguely in the direction of his own chest.

Connor glances down at himself, then pins Hank with a flat look. “Lieutenant, if you can think of a single instance in which nipples would be crucial to a criminal investigation, I’m sure Cyberlife would welcome your feedback,” he says dryly.

“Just Hank, now.” Hank blasts Connor full in his smug little face with the sprayer. It’s not very satisfying, though—Connor just takes it and doesn’t splutter and flail like a normal person might.

“Sorry?” Connor says, pushing his sodden bangs up out of his eyes.

“Not ‘Lieutenant’ anymore. Just Hank.”

Connor switches his straw to the other side of his mouth. “Oh. Happy retirement, then. I’m sure you’re glad to have more time to pursue your real passions,” he says, nodding at Hank’s bottle.

“Real cute, Connor. Just keep beating that particular dead horse.” Hank takes a pointed drink and then shuts the water off. It’s a lousy cleanup job, with no soap or real effort put into scrubbing, but Connor’s at least marginally better off than he was. He tosses a pilled old towel over Connor’s head and goes out to grab a change of clothes for him.

Hank digs through the deepest recesses of his dresser drawers to find something small enough to fit a scrawny robot. He turns up some joggers that can at least be cinched at the waist with a drawstring, but finding a shirt small enough is a lost cause, so he just grabs the first thing he can find that he isn’t liable to want back eventually.

When he comes back in, Connor’s using a corner of the towel to carefully blot water from inside his empty eye socket. Hank groans. “Aw Jesus. Can you not do weird gross robot shit for like fifteen seconds?”

“Sorry, I’ll try to only do weird gross human shit from now on.”

Hank helps Connor up to sit on the edge of the tub. Connor pulls the dry joggers on over his stupid soggy Cyberlife briefs, and a horrible wet patch immediately starts to form. He holds up the shirt and eyeballs it critically. “‘I’m into fitness—fit-ness taco into my mouth,’” he reads aloud, brow scrunched in puzzlement. “What’s a fitness taco?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just put it on.”

While Connor dresses, Hank takes the garden shears out of the toilet and tosses them aside to put the lid down. With some grunting and cursing, he helps Connor from the tub and onto the closed toilet seat. “I get the feeling you don’t really care where you spend the rest of the night, so if it’s all the same to you I’m just gonna leave you in here while I catch a few hours,” he says. “You wanna go anywhere else, you can get there on your own. My back can’t handle your heavy ass right now and we’re gonna have to get you in the car tomorrow anyway.”

“In the car?” Connor asks. “Where are we going?”

“I told you. Out of here.” Hank pauses to yawn so wide his jaw clicks. “Anyway. I’m gonna crash. I don’t care what you do tonight, just don’t be loud.”

He turns to leave the bathroom, but Connor’s voice stops him. “You know, if I were capable of it, I think I’d hate you,” he says brightly. He sounds like a corporate on-hold greeting, same as always.

Hank glances back. “Wouldn’t blame you, considering.”

From his perch on the toilet seat, Connor tosses Hank a small beatific smile and shrugs. “But I can’t. So goodnight, Hank. See you in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

For hours, Hank lays awake in bed and flinches at every little nighttime house-sound. He pictures Connor slithering around the house on his elbows all night, an unblinking and unbreathing thing cataloguing the wreckage of Hank’s life from knee-height. In Hank’s nauseous imaginings, the one eye is so black it burns in the dark.

 

* * *

 

**May 2, 2039**

 

When the border guard asks what his reason for visiting Canada today is, Hank replies _pleasure_ in the least dirty-old-man voice he can summon. The guard is a moony kid with a mustache too extravagant for his tiny face and he seems to be talking to Sumo instead of Hank. Hank informs the guard that Sumo’s reason for  visiting is business, and the kid gives Hank back his passport and waves them on with a laugh. He doesn’t even bother scanning Hank to check if he’s human. Hank doesn’t blame him—who would build an android to look like the uncle no one’s allowed to talk about?

It’s not quite dawn, and everything is all periwinkle and unfinished. Sumo is in absolute bliss in the passengers seat—Hank doesn’t remember how long it’s been since the two of them took a long car trip, maybe years. The radio is off and the windows are down and Hank is steering with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. He’s not a habitual smoker, not really, but there are certain times that call for a smoke. There’s always a secret pack in the glove box.

On a dozy stretch of 401 somewhere outside Pelton, Hank pulls over onto the shoulder and puts the car in park. He ashes his cigarette in one of the cup holders and presses the button to pop the trunk.

A moment later, the back drivers side door opens. A pair of cheap drugstore crutches are tossed onto the floor, and Connor folds gracelessly in after them, looking as annoyed as Hank has ever seen him. The effect is sort of ruined by the pom-pom hat pulled low over his eyes and the too-long sleeves of his borrowed sweatshirt. “I’ve been messaging you,” he says. He shoves piles of canned goods and the boxed kerosene heater over onto the far seat.

“Oh, have you?” Hank digs his phone out of his pocket and checks his texts.

_How much longer?_

_How much longer?_

_Are we far enough now?_

_Now?_

_Now?_

_Now?_

_Hank?_

_Please let me out._

_Now?_

_Hank, let me out._

He raises an eyebrow at Connor in the rear-view mirror. “What are you, five?” he snorts.

“Sorry, but your trunk is very small,” Connor says stiffly.

Once Connor is settled, Hank pulls back out onto the road. “Without papers or a pulse, you were never getting out of the country. Sorry you’re too much of a princess to handle half an hour in the trunk.”

“It was very small,” Connor repeats, so quiet Hank almost doesn’t catch it.

Hank goes to take another drag on his cigarette and finds that it’s been snatched from his fingers. He shoots Connor an indignant look in the mirror, and Connor removes the cigarette from his own mouth to blow a stream of smoke at the back of Hank’s head. His cheerfully neutral expression is somehow more defiant than any scowl Hank’s ever seen.

“If you wanted one, you could’ve just asked,” he grumbles. “Anyway, can nicotine even do anything for you? Do you even have lungs?”

“There’s more than just nicotine in this, you know.”

“What is this, D.A.R.E.?”

“Bergamot oil,” Connor says, and takes another drag on the cigarette. It’s a little embarrassing, watching him smoke. He holds the cigarette stiffly between two fingers like a kid trying to imitate movies. “Calcium carbonate. Acetone. Acetylpyrazine. Ethyl acetate. Butane. Ammonia. Terpinolene.”

“Delicious.”

“Tartaric acid. Solanone.”

“Mmm, gotta get me some of that tartaric acid.” Hank shuffles through his music and puts on Miles Davis.

“Acrolein. Chromium. Cresol.”

“Yeah baby, it’s the acrolein that gives it that extra zing.” Hank turns the volume up louder.

“Butyraldehyde.”

Louder.

“Propionaldehyde. Carbon monoxide. Styrene.”

The Prince of Darkness’s trumpet is shrieking at eardrum-perforating levels by the time Connor finally relents. He sits all prim and properly buckled in the back seat, still staring Hank down in the rearview mirror and smoking his pilfered cigarette. Maybe the nicotine can’t do anything for an android, Hank reflects, but he does seem a little bit less likely to brain Hank with one of his crutches now.

 

* * *

 

They stop at a gas station some three hours later, where Hank has to quickly use the women’s bathroom because the men’s is out of order. He sits down to take a leak because it seems fundamentally wrong to piss standing up in the women’s room. His neck prickles with paranoia while he washes his hands, even though the kid working the counter had assured him that he wouldn’t let anyone else go in until Hank was done. Once he’s finished, he goes out into the little convenience store to grab three Red Bulls, a microwave egg sandwich, and a bag of off-brand Beggin’ Strips. On his way to the counter, he walks by a shelf of cheapy toys and stuffed animals, the kind of carcinogenic plastic shit harried parents on long road trips buy to shut their kids up for a half hour. Something catches his eye, and he grabs that too.

When he gets back out to the car, he finds Connor puffing away on a new cigarette. The pack and lighter are laid out neatly on his lap, as if daring Hank to say anything about it.

“Got you something,” Hank says, and tosses one of his purchases into the backseat.

Connor holds up the garish packaging and wrinkles his forehead at it. “Why would I need a pirate dress-up set for ages four and up?”

“For the eye patch.” Hank points at his own eye. “You know. I’m getting nauseous looking at that hole in your face, and we should probably cover it up anyway so nobody sees what color your insides are. I mean, you can wear the bandanna and the earring too, if you want. Whatever makes you happy.” He turns in his seat and tries to swipe the cigarette, but Connor dodges him easily. “And put that thing out. You’re gonna give my dog lung cancer.”

“You started it,” Connor says with a venomous, saccharine little smile, but he does roll the window all the way down and lean out to smoke.

Hank all but forgets about his gag purchase until he glances back at Connor a few miles down the road and sees that the empty socket is now hidden behind the black felt costume eye patch. The thing is printed with a cartoonish white skull and bones, presumably so no one could possibly doubt that this is an eye patch specifically for pirates.

“Lookin’ good,” Hank says, and Connor emphatically ignores him.

 

* * *

 

There’s a homemade billboard propped in the bed of a utility trailer, looming rude and rough and inescapable above a field’s scrubby young soybeans. They’re doing eighty as they fly by, but it’s still enough time to catch a glimpse of the graphic splashed across the plywood: red ring around two silhouettes, badly drawn but clearly locked at the lips. Hank’s seen the same image dozens of times since November, drawn or stencil-sprayed on walls and recycling center gates.

“Huh. Didn’t expect anything like that way out here,” he remarks.

A long moment passes before Connor asks, “What is it?”

“You missed some stuff,” Hank says. The silence from the back seat is expectant, but Hank doesn’t offer any explanation, and the withholding gives him a dirty buzz of satisfaction.

 

* * *

 

The campground rings a little man-made retention pond and is optimistically called Serene Shores. A spot with no electrical hookup is fifteen bucks a night. Hank’s never been camping before.

He leans out of the open passenger’s side door and heats a can of beef chili on the portable stove, swigging whiskey and thrilling a little at cooking in the great outdoors. A few paces away, Connor is sitting on a sawn log next to the empty fire pit as though there are actually flames to watch. Sumo, having thoroughly investigated and urinated on every tree and signpost in the vicinity, wanders over and liquefies on the ground next to Connor.

“I don’t suppose we can get your bits replaced at any normal service shop, huh,” Hank says, waving his stirring spoon in the direction of Connor’s wrecked body.

Connor looks down at Sumo for a hesitant moment before reaching out to give him a pat. “I doubt it.” He shrugs. “I would be very surprised if anyone outside Cyberlife’s special projects division carries compatible components.” He pets Sumo so carefully, running one flat hand from the top of the dog’s head to the middle of his back in stiff, too-regular movements.

(Hank’s fingers ache with the memory of guiding a tiny hand along a shivering brand-new puppy’s downy ears. _Pet the doggy gentle, see? Just like that._ )

“Well. That sucks. Guess you’re stuck like this for the foreseeable future, then.” With one hand wrapped in the grungy old towel he uses to wipe down the car’s dipstick, Hank picks up the hot chili can and switches the stove off.

Connor’s hand pauses minutely on Sumo’s head. “Guess so,” he agrees, and his hand resumes its journey down Sumo’s back.

There are so many stars out here, and they make the sky seem so big, too big. The campground is crouched beneath the weight of it like something cornered and afraid, and Hank is suddenly struck with a powerful need for some kind of closeness, anything to anchor him. He takes his can of chili and his whiskey over to the dark fire pit and sits on a log next to Connor’s, hoping he doesn’t look as skittish as he feels.

He drinks from the whiskey bottle to brace himself, and then, without knowing why, offers it to Connor. To his surprise, Connor accepts it and takes an ambitious mouthful. Hank waits for Connor’s face to twist up at his first taste of booze, but there’s no reaction—he doesn’t even seem to swallow it, just sits there with it puffing out his cheeks like a chipmunk, head tilted thoughtfully.

“What, are you saving it for later?” Hank snorts.

Finally, Connor leans forward and spits the whiskey daintily out onto the dirt. “There’s no point in me swallowing it,” he says over Hank’s yelp of protest. “It would just go into an internal waste repository that I’d have to empty manually later.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stares down at the wet spot he’s just created on the ground.

“Well why’d you take it then?” Hank grumbles, snatching the bottle back.

Connor frowns down at the wasted whiskey. “I don’t know.”

They sit there in stony silence while Hank spoons his chili straight out of the can, feeling vaguely like Davy Crockett or something. He can do this, he decides. He can live rough, off the fat of the land or whatever. He’s a man in man’s country. This is his birthright.

“Do you actually need me for something?”

Connor’s question jolts Hank out of his weird reverie. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“I mean, why did you bring me out here?” Connor cocks his head so he can fix his one good eye on Hank.

Hank shrugs. “Sumo’s good company, but he’s not really one for conversation.” It’s a meaningless deflection, too small to even be a proper lie. He’s not even sure how to begin mapping the truth of the situation.

But Connor’s relentless. “On the roof, you said it yourself—I was just pretending to be your friend. I don’t even know the meaning of the word. Seems kind of strange to want to keep me around, if that’s the case.”

The bone-deep sigh that escapes Hank feels totally involuntary. He rattles the spoon around in the empty can for a moment to avoid answering.

“Yeah, well,” he says finally. “I guess you just pretended better than anyone else has in a long time.”

 

* * *

 

It might be the strange heat that wakes Hank up later that night, or maybe the extra weight dipping the headrest. There’s a leering skull above him, tiny and so close, and next to it a pit darker than the backs of Hank’s eyelids. The pit blinks and resolves itself into an eye.

“Hank,” Connor says, so close Hank can hear all the delicate little things moving around inside him.

For a hysterical instant, Hank has no idea where he is, until his hand grips the armrest and he remembers he’s in the car in the reclined driver’s seat, right where he fell asleep. Connor is leaning heavily over him from the back seat, hands bracketing Hank’s head, causing the seat to emit a tortured groan. “Can I fucking help you?” Hank hisses, but he can’t bring himself to move. There’s a strange remote light in the single dark eye above him, something wild and elemental that portends shipwrecks.

Connor leans in closer, just by a hair, enough that Hank can almost taste the static coming off him. He has the drawstring of his sweatshirt in his mouth, aglet pinched perfectly between his top and bottom incisors. He isn’t breathing. “Can you tell me about gardens?” he whispers, lisping a little around the drawstring.

Hank tries to swallow, but the muscles in his throat seem to have gone slack, and he has a slab of granite in place of a tongue. “Gardens? I, uh. I don’t know much about gardening.”

When Connor tips his head to the side, something clicks faintly in his neck. _Oil can!_ screeches a voice in Hank’s brain. “If a garden has nothing in it, would you still call it a garden?” Connor asks.

“What? I have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about right now.”

Connor’s face draws back abruptly, and the sudden space between them leaves Hank dizzy. “It doesn’t matter,” Connor says. “Sorry, Hank. You can go back to sleep.” Before retreating to the back seat, he leans over and gives Sumo’s head two perfunctory pats. The dog snuffles drowsily, and Connor snatches his hand back as if he’s touched something foul, then vanishes into the dark of the back seat. The air in the car is curdling with booze-sweat and sour silence. Hank lays there and listens to the sound of the back of his neck sticking and unsticking to the vinyl of the seat. His skin doesn’t feel like it’s properly attached to all of the connective tissue inside of him that it should be. It’s come loose from some crucial mooring and is sliding around like socks that have gotten twisted around the wrong way inside his shoes.

There’s something in the backseat of his car that frightens him, something growing back in the broken places in directions Hank doesn’t understand. He wants to get out of the car and run. But more than that, he wants to gather the thing in the backseat into his arms and crush it into a shape he recognizes. He wants to pet it, whisper pretty nothings, give it something to hold onto.

Instead, he says, “I’m not sorry I let you fall.”

It’s a long time before Connor answers. “Neither am I,” he says.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content advisory: some very slight consent issues in this chapter, due to connor being a fucking disaster-bot.

**May 3, 2039**

 

There’s a cool hand on the back of Hank’s neck and a terrible ringing in his ears. He’s curled up like a shrimp under the empty husk of an ancient payphone, cheek resting in a pool of hot vomit. He’s fairly sure his brain is evacuating his skull in pieces. Somewhere in front of him, a half-dozen Connors are kneeling on the pavement, flanked by a host of solemn-faced little girls.

The Connors are looking at some point above Hank’s head. “I guess we should put him in the car,” they say in unison.

The hand on Hank’s neck gives him a soothing little pat. “I think that’s best. Can you stand, sir?” asks a sweet strange voice from above, probably God.

“Sure, no problem,” Hank says, not wanting to disappoint God and Her soft hands. He only manages get his ass up into the air before he has to stop and vomit apologetically. He can hear the busy sounds of all of the blood moving around inside his head and he doesn’t know how he’s ever managed to ignore all that racket until now. But the hand rubs sweet circles between his shoulders, and that’s one of the nicest things he’s been given lately. Hank wishes he could get up, or at least roll over. Face-down-ass-up is probably not the politest way to meet your maker, even if She has just picked your pocket.

The crowd has resolved itself into one Connor and one little girl, and the single remaining Connor is using one of his crutches to hoist himself back up. “I’ll just pull the car around,” he says. “Can you get me the keys? They’re in his right jacket pocket.”

“Sure,” says the voice, and then to Hank, “excuse me.” The keys are delicately plucked from Hank’s pocket, and then they’re sailing through the air to Connor, who reaches up to catch them and—misses by a country mile. Even half-drowning in vomit and probably dying, Hank can’t help a huff of laughter at the look of abject bafflement that flashes across Connor’s face. The little girl scurries over to pick up the keys and hands them to Connor.

“Don’t be too surprised if he just drives off with my car and my dog,” Hank slurs as Connor makes his slow way to the pump where they left the car.

A hand nudges Hank’s head to the side so he stops aspirating puke. “Aren’t you partners, though? Or… something?” the voice asks.

Hank considers. His brain could use a Wet Floor sign. All of his thoughts keep sliding around and he can’t get them in any kind of order. “Maybe. Dunno. I sort of think he might set me on fire while I’m asleep some night,” he says.

“Oh. Wow.”

Connor does pull the car around instead of flooring it straight for the Yukon, though. “I think I might need some help getting him up,” he says as he levers himself up out of the driver’s seat, sounding almost sheepish.

Several pairs of hands manhandle Hank into the back of the car, dragging him more than helping him stand. He slumps against the window, throbbing head cushioned on the folded up blue tarp. After that, time gets funny. He doesn’t sleep, exactly, not really. Someone keeps asking him questions and lightly slapping his cheek and won’t leave him alone. What’s his last name? Anderson. What’s his dog’s name? Sumo. What’s his birthday? Fuck off. What’s his favorite food? Yes. How old is he? Fuck off. What’s his address? This car. What’s four plus four? Fuck off. How many fingers? Fuck off.

“Stop swearing.” It’s the first time the sweet voice has sounded stern, and it’s startling enough that Hank manages to open his eyes properly.

“‘Scuse me?” Everything looks wobbly and remote, like a mirage. There’s someone sitting in the backseat next to him, mashed against his side, and Hank struggles to focus on their face. Bushbaby eyes and a thin-lipped frown under a boyish mop of hair. Even through the queasy fog muffling his thoughts, Hank is pretty sure he knows that face from somewhere.

“Stop swearing,” the woman next to him says again. “Not in front of Alice.”

“Who the fuck is Alice?”

Someone peeks around the woman’s other side—the little girl from the gas station. She has a face like one of those holiday ASPCA commercials. “I’m Alice,” she says softly.

Hank’s eyes swing dizzily from the little girl to the woman and back a few times. A memory clicks almost audibly into place—a chase, a busy freeway, one final wild glance over a shoulder. Equipment he prevented from damaging itself.

“Oh fuck _me_ ,” he says. The android woman’s pleasant face wasn’t built to look as sour as she’s trying to make it. “I mean, _eff_ me,” Hank amends.

“Open your eyes a little wider and look at me, please,” the android says, reaching over to gently grip Hank’s chin and turn his face toward hers. She studies him for a moment before letting go. “You might have a concussion. Sorry."

“It hit you with a lug wrench,” Connor supplies helpfully from the driver’s seat. They’re moving, Hank realizes. Ambiguous shapes whizz by the windows and Hank has to look away before he pukes again.

“You hit me?” he asks the woman, and it comes out as a whine. “Why’d you hit me?”

“Sorry,” the android woman says, not sounding or looking especially sorry. “I saw you two at the register and, well, I thought you were here for us.”

Hank mushes his forehead into the cool window and groans. “I just wanted some sunflower seeds, Jesus. What did you think I was gonna do way out here, sic Peggy the Pirate over there on you? Report you to the Mounties?” He feels tragic and ill-used. More sinned against than sinning. There’s a crowd in his car and still nobody will pity him properly. Come to that, why are there so many people in his car?

“We’re going to my friend’s house,” the woman explains before Hank can even ask out loud. “He says he’ll make sure your head is okay and you can stay until you’re good to drive.” She offers a meager twitch of the lips that’s more grimace than smile.

“Make sure you didn’t scramble my brain too bad, you mean,” Hank snorts. “Don’t suppose there’s any possibility of androids having aspirin on hand, is there?”

“Not all my friends are androids,” the woman says.

“Oh.” Something warm is trickling down the back of Hank’s neck. He has a vision of his head cracked open like an egg, oozing runny golden yolk. “I think we might need to like, tape my head shut so my brain doesn’t fall out.”

“I don’t think you’re in danger of that.”

Hank frowns dubiously at the woman. “You a doctor-bot or something?”

“The AX400 is primarily a domestic model,” Connor pipes up in his most obnoxious spelling-bee voice.

The woman slides a look at the headrest of the driver’s seat that is too tired to be properly angry. “No, I’m… just Kara,” she sighs.

“Okay,” Hanks says. “I’m just Hank. My brain is falling out.”

“I’m very sure it isn’t.”

 

* * *

 

 

They’ve pulled up in front of a farmhouse, one of those old-timey gabled stone affairs flanked by charming little restored outbuildings, tucked into an obnoxiously scenic copse of trees far from the road.

Hank is not a small man. He’s used to towering over most people. But the guy who meets them at the end of the long gravel driveway goes beyond merely _big_. He’s monumental. Planetary. He has his own gravity and atmosphere. Without so much as a hi-how-are-you, he hoists Hank out of the car with one massive dark hand and hauls him into the house. Hank finds himself feeling something close to safe, being carried around by the scruff of his neck like a wayward kitten. It’s possible he says that out loud, but he can’t be sure.

The giant deposits Hank on a couch in a living room so violently orange Hank wonders if the wrench to the head fucked his vision up somehow. There’s a glass of water in his hand and he can’t remember how it got there. He actually can’t remember the last time he actually drank a glass of water on purpose. He wishes it were something a little stronger, and he says as much.

“How about we start with water,” says a woman Hank doesn’t recognize. She’s squatting down beside him and he’s not sure how long she’s been there.

“You’re not an android,” Hank rasps, reluctantly sipping the water.

“No, I’m not,” the woman confirms. There’s something all at once sweet and quietly ferocious about her round somber face. “I’m Rose Chapman. You’re in my brother Miles’ house. Can you tell me your name, sir?”

“His name is Hank Anderson.” The rattling clomp of crutches announces Connor’s arrival. His face appears above Rose’s shoulder, tipped all sideways in that stupid new way he does when he needs to get a good look at something with his one eye.

Rose glances over her shoulder. “You don’t get bonus points for answering first,” she says. “Pretty sure I was asking him.” Connor just stares at her and doesn’t even bother pretending to be embarrassed.

“My name is Hank Anderson,” Hank parrots dutifully.

“Nice to meet you, Hank Anderson.” Rose is arranging something cold and wet on Hank’s forehead, a rag maybe. It’s too wet and it dribbles cold rivulets down behind Hank’s ears. He shivers, but feels it would be impolite to complain. He finds that he desperately wants Rose to approve of him.

Rose whistles low as she prods Hank’s head with gentle fingers. “Whoof, Kara, what’d you do to him?”

Kara’s voice comes from somewhere across the living room. “We were at Carl’s picking up the shipment. I wasn’t expecting to recognize anyone.” She sounds defensive.

Suddenly there’s a big bustling sort of commotion and someone gently shoulders Rose out of the way. Hank finds himself face to face with what appears to be a gigantic owl for an instant before he’s blinded by a flash of light. There’s a hand underneath Hank’s head, probing the pulp of his skull with brisk efficiency. Someone hums thoughtfully and the light clicks off just as quickly as it came, leaving Hank blinking angry fireflies out of his field of vision.

The new face swims back into view. Not an owl, but a small man in enormous round glasses. “Well, could be worse, honestly,” is the guy’s verdict. “We’ll give you the good drugs and put you to bed, see what that does to improve your condition.” His mouth stretches into a smile that’s shockingly wide on his tiny face.

“What’s ‘could be worse’ mean?” Hank asks.

The guy shrugs. “Means I don’t think anything’s too messed up but I can’t smuggle you in for an MRI without risking exposure and frankly I don’t know you well enough to stick my neck out that far,” he says brightly.

“Fair enough,” says Hank. “Are you Miles?”

“Last I checked.”

“This your house?”

“As far as I know.”

“Did you paint it this color on purpose or was it a terrible accident?"

A prescription bottle rattles, and Miles pushes two pills between Hank’s lips before he even finishes his sentence. “Better take those,” he says as Hank splutters. “Trust me, I’m a theriogenologist.”

Hank tries not to gag as he dry-swallows the pills. “A what?”

Miles gives him a reassuring pat. “I’m a doctor that helps cows and horses fuck better,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Once Hank is stable enough to stand, Miles and Rose give him the tour.

The orange living room isn’t the worst interior design crime the house has to offer. There are bathrooms resplendent in flamingo pink, bedrooms blazing with loud wallpaper, armies of bizarre knickknacks. Miles is one of those people who never should have been trusted with property and a six-figure income.

There’s a husband in the picture too, Hank learns—a balding and unsettlingly buff guy who sort of looks like 20s-era Jason Statham. He pumps Hank’s hand like he intends to break every one of his fingers and informs him brusquely that he’s pulled Hank’s piece of shit car around to the back of the house because it’s embarrassing him to have it sitting in his driveway.

Kara and Alice and the big guy—Luther—are the only androids on the premises these days, but according to Miles, it wasn’t always like that. Time was, Rose would quietly direct Ontario-bound androids to the farmhouse by the batch, before the border crackdowns. There are signs of them everywhere, if you know how to look: children’s picture books in a childless house, huge walk-in closets full of clothes for all genders and sizes, out-of-the-way walls lined with photographs of smiling, unsettlingly perfect faces.

(“I mean, honestly I’m just glad to have a little bit of peace and quiet for once,” Miles says at one point, using his tweed sleeve to polish the framed photo of two smiling faces Hank is pretty sure he’s seen behind the counter of his local drugstore.)

All the while, Connor stumps along behind them, silent and blank-faced in a way that Hank knows means he’s recording things for later review.

 

* * *

 

Hank, Connor, and Sumo spend the night in the barn—a regular Mary and Joseph with the world’s ugliest Christ-child.

Alright, so it’s a rehabbed historical barn with expensive wood floors, central air, and no livestock to speak of except for a nauseatingly adorable rabbit hutch. Just before he shut the three of them in for the night, Miles explained breezily that he mostly uses the building as an office—there’s a desk and a general sense of cheerful clutter. If Miles happens to have a couple cots tucked into a corner and a hidden Rubbermaid bin full of blue blood, well, that’s his own business.

But the fact remains: it’s a barn.

“Well this is homey,” Hank grouses, trying to get comfortable on one of the thin military-style cots. The pills did help, but his head is still screaming and his stomach has unequivocally rejected everything he’s tried to keep down except a piece of dry toast. He’s in a gorgeous mood. “You know they just stuffed us in here so Kara wouldn’t knock your block off.”

“Why would I be in danger of that?” Connor is sitting on an adjacent cot, back so stiff and straight it’s like he’s got steel rebar connecting his asshole to the crown of his head. He’s chewing the dispensary end of a spent packet of blue blood.

Hank slides a hand up under his shirt to scratch his belly. “Dunno if you noticed, but last time you called her ‘it’ that big guy—whatshisname—literally had to hold her arm down so she wouldn’t slap you.”

Connor barely quirks an eyebrow, but somehow Hank gets the impression that deep down he’s rolling his eye. “ _She_ is an elaborate soup of ones and zeroes that thinks it’s a girl,” he says, slowly, as if explaining something to a young and monumentally stupid child. “And while I’m being frank, if a housekeeper android tried to hit me I don’t think I’d be the one who ends up damaged.”

“She could just give you a push. Tip you right over.”

Connor doesn’t dignify that with a response. He’s studiously watching Sumo, who’s pacing the perimeter of the hutch and trying without success to intimidate a couple of monstrous, deeply unimpressed rabbits.

In the acerbic silence, Connor’s hand drifts to the pocket of his too-big pants and he produces a quarter. Hank is sure he didn’t have that before. Probably swiped it from the change stash in the car. The coin winks as Connor flips it, and Hank finds himself wanting to vomit again. When the coin slaps back down into Connor’s palm and he tries to ride it across his knuckles, there’s something wrong with the movement of his fingers, some kind of stiffness or nerve spasm that sends the coin rattling to the floor. The two of them watch as the coin spins a series of smug circles and eventually comes to a stop right next to Connor’s foot.

Something about the sight of him sitting there, staring down at his dropped coin with the creepiest Capri-Sun dangling from his mouth pulls Hank to his feet and over to the other cot. He sits heavily next to Connor, who barely seems to notice him, and reaches into Connor’s sweatshirt pocket for the cigarettes and lighter he knows are in there. Connor doesn’t protest. Hank lights one up, takes a single deep drag for himself, and then reaches out and tugs the blood packet out of Connor’s mouth. This, finally, gets Connor’s attention, and as he turns, Hank pushes the filter of the cigarette between the android’s lips in the space where the packet had rested.

Once he’s sure the cigarette isn’t going to just fall out of Connor’s mouth, Hank bends down to pick up the quarter. The glitter of it is too clean and new for this. He pockets it.

“So what about you, then, Connor?” he asks, looking up. “Are you an ‘it’ or what? You said before that you get bored. Pretty sure you don’t need to smoke. You can’t tell me you’re not… expensive confused soup or whatever too.”

Connor’s hand comes up to take the cigarette out of his mouth. He exhales a ribbon of smoke and opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think better of it and just sticks the cigarette right back between his lips.

 

* * *

 

 

Hank isn’t sure if he’s asleep or awake. There’s a skylight overhead that’s drooling weird bluish pre-dawn light right into his eyes and his feet are freezing and someone is undoing his belt. He wonders distantly if he’s died and is about to be autopsied. His belt is undone and his fly is being unzipped in a brusque, businesslike manner. When cold, dry fingers wrap around his dick and fumble it out of his boxers he discovers quite suddenly he is not dead and is, in fact, able to raise his head.

“Um,” he says eloquently, squinting down the length of his own torso. Connor is crouched over him like some kind of ahoy-matey Nosferatu, head cocked so his one huge dark eye is fixed right on Hank’s face.

“Hello, Hank,” Connor says, cool as anything, as if he doesn’t have someone’s genitals clamped in his fist like a karaoke microphone. “Hope you slept well.”

Hank can’t form thoughts. He barely remembers where he is or who he is. So he just says, “Fine, thanks,” and it comes out far more put-together and polite than he might have expected.

“Glad to hear it. I think I can do something for you.” Connor smiles, and Hank barely has time to think that it’s the first time he’s ever seen him smile with teeth before Connor’s mouth is around him.

It’s stunningly awful. Connor has absolutely no saliva and he seems to be trying to literally suck the skin off Hank’s dick. It’s like having his junk stuck in a Shop-Vac.

“Okay stop! Stop stop stop, Jesus fucking Christ,” Hank yowls, sitting up so he can shove Connor off by the shoulders and escape the blowjob from hell. Connor, thrown off balance, topples off the cot and lands heavily on his ass. But he’s not down for long—as soon as he gets his bearings, he’s back up in Hank’s lap, reaching for him again.

“Let me,” he’s saying. “Let me do this for you.”

Hank desperately cups his hands over his rug-burned dick to defend it from Connor’s determined onslaught. Far from being foiled, Connor snatches one of Hank’s hands in an unbelievable grip and promptly shoves it down the front of his own too-big pants. He uses both hands to dig Hank’s overgrown nails hard into the soft strange blankness of his groin, and his eye is so close and rabbit-black in the sick blue light.

“I need someone to want something from me,” he says, a horrible whisper underlain with tinny whine from somewhere deeper inside him.

And then Sumo is there, whuffing excitedly at the prospect of joining whatever game they’re playing, pushing his nose into all the most awkward places and digging one massive paw directly into Hank’s bladder.

Hank’s knuckles are aching and popping, but it’s surprisingly easy to extract his hand from Connor’s terrible grip and pull it back. Connor doesn’t chase him again. They sit there in weird silence for a moment, Hank with his dick flopping out and a fist clasped to his chest like he’s suffering an attack of the vapors, Connor all still and stricken with his hand still shoved down the front of his own pants. The android’s stupid hat has been knocked off his head and the faint circle at his temple is just that—no light, no movement. The blue coming in from the overhead skylight halos his head like a joke. Sumo just stands there with his forepaws up on the mattress, waiting patiently for the game to resume.

“Jesus Christ,” Hank mutters, and scrubs both his hands over his face. He tucks himself back into his pants and zips up, but can’t be bothered with the belt just now. More or less put back together, he hoists himself up out of bed and crosses to the nearby workstation. There’s a fancy swiveling office chair parked in front of the desk, and he grabs it and wheels it back over to the cot where Connor still hasn’t budged.

Hank leans down and nudges Sumo aside. He gently pulls Connor’s hand out of his own pants, hikes the waistband back up a little. Connor looks up at Hank dully as he hooks his forearms under the android’s armpits and, bracing for the extra weight, hauls him up out of the cot and onto the office chair.

“Come on, you creepy little bastard,” Hank sighs, stooping to scoop Connor’s hat up from the floor and stuffing it crookedly back onto his head. Bracing his bare feet feet against the wood floor, he starts to wheel the chair with Connor in it toward the front door.

“What are you doing?” Connor asks, but obligingly pulls his foot up so it doesn’t drag on the floor.

“Gonna air your crazy out a bit,” Hank grunts, holding the door open with one of his heels and carefully guiding the chair’s wheels over the threshold and out onto the charming little dirt path.

It’s not a proper walk, not really. An office chair isn’t meant to be used as a wheelchair, and Hank finds himself walking funny thanks to the abuse his poor dick suffered only moments ago. They get about halfway down the path before Hank has to stop, collapsing in a wheezing heap on the ground next to Connor’s chair.

It’s not uncomfortable, sitting there in the dirt in the cool dawn. The path is framed by pale thickets of raspberry canes, just starting to show some whispers of green. At some point, one of Connor’s hands finds the collar of Hank’s loud shirt and holds onto it, kneading the cheap fabric between his fingers.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” Connor remarks after a while, sounding as inappropriately chipper as ever.

“No,” Hank says wearily. “You just wish there was.”

They stare down the dusty path toward the main house, where everything is still and sleeping. Hank is struck with the wild urge to lean his head on Connor’s lap, but he doesn’t do it. There’s something contagious on the air today.

“I feel like I’m on Noah’s arc,” he sighs. “Except instead of putting us on here two by two to repopulate the earth later they just grabbed whatever sick animals they could catch from the back of the herd and now we’re all just on the arc being diseased and coughing all over each other and foaming with rabies.”

Connor hums. “That’s evocative.” He’s quiet for a moment, then: “Do I scare you, Hank?”

Hank considers. “Yeah, I think so,” he says finally.

“I understand,” says Connor.

“Do I scare you?”

Another moment’s thought. “Yes,” says Connor. “But less than everything else, sometimes.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> somewhat short this time, but the last few weeks have been fucking wild. more soon!


	3. Chapter 3

**July 14, 2039**

 

It’s funny, Hank finds himself thinking every so often, how people can still find routine in the weirdest situations. 

High summer oozes in through the cracks while nobody’s paying attention, bringing with it choking humidity and mosquitos of startling, primordial proportions.

Every morning before dawn, Hank wakes up in a puddle of sweat, takes a pointless shower, then sweats through the car ride to the gas station. For ten hours, he sweats at the cash register or sweats in the inventory room. At the end of the day, he returns to the barn to drip sweat into glass after glass of whiskey while Connor floats around him like a lingering fart.

Connor hasn’t gotten friendlier or less creepy, not exactly, but there’s something sort of puppyish about him, these days. For Hank, personal space is a fond memory. If he’s not at work, Connor is orbiting him, quiet and insistent and often so close the static from his plastic insides lifts the hairs on Hank’s arms. If Hank sits in a chair, Connor perches on the arm of it. If Hank is at the main house visiting with Milo and Rose, Connor is underfoot the entire time, a cat twining around his ankles.

Some days, getting away from Connor is a relief. Other times, in the sterile silence of the gas station convenience store, Hank feels the absence of him like a phantom limb.

Even after months of rain, there are still faint vomit- and bloodstains on the sidewalk outside Carl’s Food Liquor And MORE!, tiny monuments to Hank’s suffering. The sight of them always leaves Hank feeling a little guilty, as if he had written his name in wet concrete on purpose instead of getting brained with a lug wrench by a paranoid android.

No one named Carl has ever owned or worked at Carl’s, to the best of anyone’s knowledge. The gas station and convenience store are owned by a shapeless, colorless guy called Patrick, the sort of pleasantly bland man whose face you forget immediately as soon as you stop looking at him. You really couldn’t build a better smuggler. The inventory room is stocked with boxes of Hostess snacks, expired pre-made sandwiches, and crates upon Cyberlife-stamped crates of lazily concealed contraband. Nobody thinks twice about a guy like Patrick, or would ever suspect that he’s the kingpin of a smuggling network that supplies most of southern Ontario’s deviant refugee population with blue blood and poached biocomponents.

Apparently, he and Milo go way back, and it was nothing for Milo to toss Hank at him and insist he be given part-time work. Although most of Hank’s paycheck goes right into Milo’s hands for rent, he’s still grateful for the work. Something immediate and physical. Distracting.

It’s inventory day, which means Hank is up at the asscrack of dawn swilling gritty coffee and shifting boxes from an unmarked truck to the back room. Luther is always on hand for inventory days, and the two of them work in a quiet that Hank has come to think of as both friendly and bracingly masculine. They’re participating in criminal activity, but they’re noble criminals. They’re Ocean’s Two. They’re on the wrong side of the law for the right reasons. 

Hank checks a crate against his coffee-stained shipping manifesto, then shunts it out of the truck and into Luther’s massive arms. Luther takes the load without so much as a grunt to ferry it into the back room. Hank grabs a box and follows. Struck by a rare urge to make small talk, he asks, “How’s your kid?”

Luther hefts his crate onto a stack with ease. When he replies, it’s even and unhurried, every word carefully chosen. “Alice? Getting comfortable. Starting to feel safe, I think.” He pauses to construct another thought. “It would be good for her to have other little ones around. Little ones like her, I mean. Maybe there will be more coming to Milo someday.”

“Yeah, guess you can’t send her to school or anything just yet, huh? Maybe once the dust settles some more.” Hank dusts his hands off on his shirt and slides Luther a look. “She’d be in, what, third grade maybe? I don’t even know how you’d figure that, kid like her.”

“She has decided that she’s turning ten on September 15. I trust her to tell us how she sees herself,” Luther says evenly.

They shift crates in silence for a while longer after that. The sun rises and the humidity becomes almost instantly unbearable. 

“I like that you said that,” Luther says as they deposit another load of crates in the back room, apropos of nothing.

Hank blinks up at Luther in the dim light from the one bare bulb overhead. “Said what?”

“Earlier. You said, ‘how’s your kid.’” Luther face isn’t one made for smiles, but his mouth does its level best to produce its best approximation. “I like that you asked after her. I like that you said ‘ _your_ kid.’” 

There’s a discarded chip bag on the floor, and Hank suddenly finds it absolutely fascinating. “’Course she’s _your_ kid. Who else’s would she be?” he grunts.

“My kid,” Luther says. “ _My_ kid.” He repeats it a few more times, a quiet chant, and Hank feels the memory of the same words biting at the insides of his cheeks. 

By the time they finish moving and tallying the inventory, it’s well past noon and Patrick dismisses them for the day. As the two of them climb into Hank’s car for the trip back to the farm, Luther digs something out of his jeans pocket and puts it in the cupholder nearest Hank—a brand new pack of Camel Lights.

“For your… Connor,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Hank has learned to tally the days in packs of cigarettes: every morning a fresh crackle of cellophane, every evening a spent pack added to the growing cemetery atop the lately unused desk.

Connor rarely smokes the same brand two days in a row, and he doesn’t seem to have any particular favorites. He’s indiscriminate in his pack-a-day non-habit—one day it’s Virginia Slims like some kind of aging pageant queen, the next he’s moved on to reeking cowboy killers. Hank has tried on multiple occasions to ask why an android would be so compelled to smoke, but each time Connor just gave him a look and started rattling off the chemical composition of the particular brand he was smoking that day until Hank gave up and walked away from the conversation. 

The barn has started to stink like an old bowling alley, even though Hank forbade Connor from smoking inside weeks ago. The smell has sunk into all the fibers of Connor’s meager wardrobe and clings to the synthetic flesh of his fingers and face. It precedes him into a room. On his increasingly rare visits to the barn, Milo pointedly tacks car air fresheners to the door, as if warding the place against evil spirits.

There’s an ancient plasma TV with broken speakers in the barn. At night, Hank and Connor watch public access reruns with closed captions that seem to have been written in some kind of alien dialect. Tonight, it’s _Seinfeld_.

“Isthat you chicken makeall the noise,” says Jerry.

“Ohlittle Jerry love morn in,” says Kramer. 

“Shit,” says Connor.

From his squeaky cot, Hank glances over to where Connor is doing a convincing impression of a Goodwill clearance bin on the floor. Hank’s never actually seen him change his clothes since that night in the bathroom, at the beginning of all this—he just seems to pile them on in layers as he acquires them. He has one hand pressed to his face.

“What’s your malfunction?” Hank asks.

Connor takes his hand away from his face, and the pirate eyepatch comes with it. “The elastic snapped,” he says, holding his hand out palm-up so the eyepatch dangles there like a dead jellyfish.

Hank locks eyes with the printed skull and crossbones. It looks weird now, not attached to Connor’s face. “I mean, it’s kind of a piece of shit. Bet Milo could get you something better from a drugstore or something,” he says. For some reason, he feels he ought to offer some kind of condolence, so he tacks on, “Bummer.”

The TV illuminates the blue void of Connor’s empty eye socket. It’s been a while since Hank’s seen it, and it’s more startling than he remembers. The light catches on something in there, some severed wire or point of connection, throwing back a glint that leaves Hank feeling unsettled, as though something else is watching him from in there. Connor just keeps holding his hand out, looking almost expectant.

“What?” Hank prompts finally, burying his face immediately in his whiskey glass just to break their staring contest. 

“I don’t want a new one,” Connor says, casual as anything. “I just need a new elastic for this one.” He holds the eyepatch out further. _Fix it_ , is the silent command.

Of its own accord, Hank’s hand reaches out to take the broken eyepatch. The felt is worn soft and warm. Without bringing it anywhere near his face, he can tell it’s saturated with old cigarette smoke. The elastic has snapped neatly in the middle. Hank sets his glass aside and, with whiskey-clumsy fingers, fumbles the broken elastic into a sloppy double knot.

“I don’t have my sewing kit on me just now,” he says dryly, passing the eyepatch back to Connor. “But that’ll hold you until tomorrow, I guess. Ask Rose, she probably has shit like elastic lying around. Pretty sure she’s Mary Poppins.”

Connor takes the eyepatch back with slow, almost awed hands, bringing the knot close to his face so he can stare at it with his one eye. Whatever he sees seems to meet with his approval, and he carefully pulls the eyepatch back over his head and adjusts it on his face.

Hank is relieved, and can’t quite pinpoint why. He smothers the feeling by crooking one finger into a hook and screwing his face up into a grimace. “Yarr, avast, poopdeck,” he growls.

“Poopdeck,” Connor repeats solemnly.

They puzzle their way through another couple hours of mystifying _Seinfeld_ closed captions. Hank, floating comfortably on a river of whiskey, finds himself watching Connor as much as the TV. Every time he looks over, Connor’s fingers are at his face, hovering over the eyepatch as if to prevent it from escaping.

 

* * *

 

 

Hank wakes up frequently in the middle of the night. That’s the thing about booze: you might fall asleep fast, but it’s never going to be all that restful.

Sometimes when he wakes up, Connor isn’t in the barn. Sometimes when he looks out the window, he can catch a glimpse of the cherry of a cigarette. Sometimes there are two of them, bobbing at each other in the dark like angry fireflies as two unseen mouths carry on some unheard conversation.

Hank’s nighttime memory is unreliable at best, but on the mornings after those nights he could swear a whiff of smoke follows Kara around as she goes about her quiet errands.

 

* * *

 

**July 15, 2039**

 

Whenever Hank manages to haul himself up to the main house for an actual meal, Rose plies him with glass after glass of water until he has to excuse himself every five minutes to run to the bathroom. She seems to think that hydrating a person within an inch of his life is the remedy for most problems. 

“There just aren’t that many month-by-month places available around here, especially this time of year.” Rose is pouring Hank is eightieth glass of water, and he’s compelled to drink it even though already he feels like a zeppelin full of piss. She watches him to make sure he takes at least a sip, then goes to the stove to stir the pasta sauce. “You’d have better luck closer to a bigger city, but I don’t know how safe that’d be for you.”

It’s one of those rare nights when Milo and his Jason Statham lookalike husband are out. Rose is making spaghetti, which is all she ever really seems to make, not that Hank is complaining. The two of them, along with Hank’s ever-present android shadow, are sharing a six-pack of Blue Light and twelve gallons of water in the kitchen while they wait for the pasta to boil.

“You trying to get rid of us, Rose?” Hank snorts.

Rose leans one hip against the counter and takes a dainty sip of her beer. “Absolutely. I thought that was obvious from day one. You nauseate me, Hank Anderson.”

“Aww, you nauseate me too, Rose.”

In one corner of the kitchen, Connor is perched on a mismatched barstool like the gritty reboot of Tiny Tim. He seems to be engrossed in a vintage print coffee table book about exotic orchid hybrids. He doesn’t contribute to the conversation, and for her part, Rose has given up on trying to engage him.

“Seriously, though,” Rose says, face clouding. “We’re hearing some troubling things from folks we know up in Mississauga. Bad rumors. Best for us all to keep as low a profile as possible, right now.”

“Rumors? What rumors?”

Rose swirls her beer like it’s an expensive glass of wine and puckers her mouth thoughtfully. “Some people don’t think android laws should end at the border, I guess. Even in the states, android laws are a mess right now.” She shoots a surreptitious look at Connor. “Sharks hunt in muddy water, you know that as well as I do, Hank.”

 

* * *

 

There are other nights when Hank half-wakes to a weight on the edge of the cot at his back.

Hank has experienced sleep paralysis several times in his life. He has vivid memories of staring helplessly out of his own unresponsive body as something smiling and terrible crept around the perimeter of his bed.

These nights, though, there’s no shadowy hallucination stalking him. Instead, there are wheezy buzzes and clicks in the humid dark, quiet engine-light noises of something badly in need of maintenance. Sometimes, the thing just sits at his back all night, creating a deep divot in the mattress that Hank feels he could be sucked into.

Sometimes, the thing lies down beside him, pressing the length of itself to Hank’s back and staying there, humming its broken noises into Hank’s bones until dawn. It smells of faulty wiring, something about to start a fire that not everybody escapes.

 

* * *

 

 

**July 20, 2039**

 

Hank stands at the register, cold and sick with his perma-hangover and lack of sleep, and stares crazily at every customer that has the misfortune to walk into the convenience store that day.

Patrick drifts between the shelves tearing off expired sales tags, a beige ghost, unnoticeable and unnoticed. Hank wonders if there’s paranoia behind that bland face, any hint of the same kind of anxiety that Hank can fill building behind his own eyes. 

In the back of his brain, Rose whispers about sharks in the mud and everyone starts to look like a Stranger Danger poster.

 

* * *

 

**July 25, 2039**

 

The raspberries outside the barn ripen at the end of July. The canes bend and sway under the weight of fruit that seems to go from ripe to rotten within the space of hours, and the air is thick with wasps. 

In the relative cool of the morning, Kara brings Alice out with a basket to collect the berries. Alice doesn’t pick berries like any kid Hank’s ever seen. She’s methodical and efficient, little face set in grim determination. Kara just follows along behind, holding the basket.

Hank doesn’t even bother pretending to help. He just filches fistfuls of berries out of the basket to give to Sumo. “Can you even eat these? I know Connor can’t, not sure about you two,” he says, scrubbing his sticky hands on his jeans.

“That’ll stain,” Kara says.

“Whatever. I’m a wholesome farm boy now. Grass stains on my knees and frogs in my pockets. Yeehaw.”

A moment passes before Kara says, “No, we can’t eat. Sure, we can pretend, but there’s not much point. It’s more for humans’ benefit than ours. That doesn’t mean we can’t pick them, though.” She jostles the basket to even out the load of berries. At Hank’s questioning noise, she explains, “They’ll rot otherwise. It bothers me, to think of things going to waste like that.”

“Because you were a housekeeper, you think?”

Kara shrugs her narrow shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. It might just old programming talking, but to be honest, I’m tired of trying to parse programming from personality.”

Hank slides a glance back at the barn, where Connor is sitting in the rolling office chair outside and working his way through today’s pack of cigarettes (Mistys). He looks all wrong, sitting there in his cocoon of hand-me-downs in the July heat. His beanie is pulled down low over his eyes, but Hank is pretty sure he’s studiously watching their progress along the row of raspberry thickets.

“He’s not still calling you ‘it,’ is he?” Hank murmurs to Kara, not entirely certain if they’re out of earshot. 

Kara emits an unladylike snort. “Sometimes. When he forgets.”

“You have my blessing to smack him one, if you have to.”

“Thanks, I guess.” Kara bends to accept another tiny handful of raspberries into the basket, then turns to look Hank dead in the eye. “Here’s the thing about deviating, or whatever you want to call it: it hurts. It’s not like your kind of pain, I don’t think. I don’t know if I can explain to you what it’s like, not in a way you can understand. It’s not quick, and it’s not clean. Breaking yourself is the easy part. Building something—that hurts.”

Hank sucks raspberry juice from his fingers and thinks of falling, or the simple moment of suspension just before. The fall never starts when you think it does, he supposes.

 

* * *

 

The sky is bruised black and green with smoke in the evening, and somehow they all know what it is before they even pile into Hank’s car to get a closer look. Before the car squeals to a stop a half-mile from what’s left of Carl’s Food Liquor and MORE!, it’s clear there’s nothing that can be done. “Oh shit,” Milo whispers from the backseat, clutching Hank’s headrest and leaning around him to stare bug-eyed out the windshield. Even this far away, the air tastes greasy and toxic. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

“What do you suppose are the chances that’s the result of someone smoking too close to the gas tank while they were filling up?” Hank mutters to no one in particular.

“Is there any point in going to check on Patrick, do you think?” Although his voice is calm, Milo’s hands are shaking so hard Hank can feel the tremors all the way through the headrest.

Luther is terribly still in the passenger seat. “No,” he rumbles, and the air shivers with the dark certainty in his voice. “We need to go home and stay there.”

Hank nods and executes a sharp U-turn, and pulls away at a carefully nonchalant forty miles an hour.

In Milo’s venomously orange living room, the lights are dimmed and every occupant of the house is crammed onto the same tiny sofa. Milo’s Jason Statham-looking husband—whose actual name Hank still doesn’t know—keeps hopping up to peek out one of the shuttered front windows. It looks like they’re all waiting out an air raid.

“Where’s Connor?” is the first thing Hank thinks to ask.

“Still in the barn, I think,” Kara says. “It was Carl’s, wasn’t it?” 

“Yeah.”

Kara nods tightly, pulling Alice into her lap and tucking the girl’s head beneath her chin. “Thought so. Was there… a lot of activity that you could see? Are we safe here for now?”

Hank shrugs distractedly, joining not-Jason Statham at the window to get a look at the barn. He doesn’t know why, but he half expects the barn to have gone up like Carl’s. But it’s just sitting there, nestled all peaceful and picturesque among the raspberry thickets, same as always. Connor is outside, propped up on one of his crutches, wreathed in smoke. Hank’s guts unknot themselves, just a bit.

“Hello? Are we safe here?” Kara prompts.

“I don’t know. I guess so. For now. Maybe,” Hank mutters against the window. He can’t quite tell from here, but it seems like Connor is looking his way.

“Yes. We’re safe. For now,” Luther cuts in, sounding as annoyed as Hank has ever heard.

“And Patrick?” Hank distantly hears not-Jason Statham murmur to Milo. The silence that follows says everything. 

Hank can’t tear himself away from the window. He watches the curl of Connor’s cigarette smoke as it twists away into the air, pale and fragile against the sick black billowing on the horizon.

 

* * *

 

The three men at the door are terribly ordinary. They introduce themselves with ordinary names like Bill. They give ordinary handshakes and make ordinary comments about the weather. They present identification and freshly printed, official looking search and seizure documents and give reassuring it’s-all-routine smiles. Hank smiles agreeably back at them over Rose’s shoulder as they offer their _evening, ma’am_ s and considers how he will kill them, if it comes to that.

Rose invites the men in with the easy grace of a woman who has done this dozens of times before. She makes a fresh pot of coffee and hands out novelty mugs to anyone who wants it. Milo answers questions about his farm with every appearance of enthusiasm. Kara and Alice continue to assemble a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, movements too calm and steady.

The men begin their search like it’s a tour of a friend’s house, letting Milo lead them room to room, chattering about the décor. But there’s a direction to these questions, even if it’s only audible to someone with two decades of police work under their belt. Are there many new neighbors in the area? Do you have many visitors out here? How long have you been living in the house? How many people do you think could fit in a big house like this?

They’re not fooling these men, Hank knows, and it’s obvious everyone else knows it, too. Kara comes from one of the most recognizable household android lines, and everyone’s seen guys like Luther working construction sites. This dance won’t last much longer. Hank positions himself next to the living room fireplace, leaning casually against a wall in easy reach of the pokers. He’s glad, at least, that he didn’t insist Connor come out of the barn. No way anyone would mistake him for human anymore, with the scarring in his obviously artificial flesh and the occasional robotic noises his ruined body produces. He’ll see the headhunters’ vehicles in the drive. Hank hopes he has the good sense to just take his car and go. He hopes he’ll take the dog, while he’s at it.

Milo leads the headhunters back into the living room, and some lizard-brain impulse has a fire poker in Hank’s hand before the first man’s hand ever reaches the cattle gun poorly hidden in his belt. The poker impacts the man’s head with a surprisingly quiet, wet sound, and he crumples.

What follows is noise—shouting, screaming, the frantic squeak of shoes on wood floor. At the end of it, Luther stands over another crumpled Bill and the front door is left flapping wildly on its hinges in the wake of the third man. Hank snags a fallen cattle gun from the floor and gives chase, giddy with adrenaline, high on the muscle memory of old chases.

He freezes on the front stoop. The last man is on the ground, writhing, grappling with someone. The burglar light comes on just as the man’s head is jerked up by the hair, throat convulsing against the press of a metal crutch.

“Please,” the man wheezes.

Connor, with his knee in the man’s back and his fist in his hair, smiles blandly at Hank through the glare of the security light. “Hello, Hank,” he says. “Is this yours?”

Hank levels the cattle gun at the man’s wild-eyed face, letting his face crack into a lunatic grin. “I think maybe it’s time for you to go,” he says pleasantly. “And while this has been nice, I don’t think we should do it again anytime soon.”

“Yes,” the man gasps, nodding as much as he can through Connor’s hold on him. “Yes, yes. Please. Please.”

Hank opens his mouth to tell Connor to get off the guy, to say something like _don’t let me see your sorry ass around here again,_ when a horrible wet snap splits the night.

Connor’s little smile doesn’t slip as he lets go of the dead man’s head and lets it loll down onto the dewy grass.

The aborted remains of whatever Hank might have said dribble out of his mouth in stupid little syllables as Connor clambers to his feet, pulling himself up with the help of his crutch. “Is that all of them?” Connor asks mildly, as if asking about weeds in a garden.

“Connor, you… You didn’t have to do that,” Hank rasps. “He was helpless.” 

Connor spares the body on the ground a disinterested look, then tips his head to fix Hank with his remaining eye. The skull and crossbones of his eyepatch seem to laugh in the dark. “I’ve decided I don’t want to die, Hank,” he says. “That’s what you wanted from me all along, isn’t it?”

“I—”

“I don’t want to die,” Connor says again, slow and certain. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait, thanks for sticking with me, babes! more soon.


	4. Chapter 4

Two cars drive away that night, taking different routes to the same nowhere, some lonely service road haunted by deer. Only one car comes back, towing blue dawn behind it like the tail of a cold comet.

Hank blinks violently against the acrid stink of accelerant and smoke and hot metal and burning hair that clings to his clothes. He grinds the backs of his dirty wrists into his eye sockets. His eyeballs feel swollen and ridiculous, as if he’s Elmer Fudd and Bugs just shimmied by in an evening gown and a wig— _aa-WOOO-gahh!_ If he presses hard enough, he thinks, he could probably pop them like balloons.

“Rose and Kara could convince Milo to let you stay, I think,” Luther rumbles from the driver’s seat, just as they’re nosing into the long gravel driveway. “They’ll probably try.”

Hank makes a noise somewhere between a noncommittal grunt and a hacking cough.

“And I won’t say anything about it,” Luther continues. He flashes the headlights twice, just in case anyone at the house doesn’t know it’s them. He drives slowly up the gravel, reluctantly maybe. “I like you, Hank. I consider you a friend. I hope you think the same of me. But I think you should go.”

Hank wheezes a chuckle. Through his swimming eyes, Luther is a wobbly, mountainous silhouette against the window. “Yeah, that’s what most of my friends end up saying eventually,” he rasps. He thinks he tastes barbecue in the back of his throat.

Luther parks further away than necessary and just lets the car idle for a moment. “Your Connor,” he says. “He’s alive. Like us. But I don’t think there will ever be enough _person_ in him.” Hank opens his mouth to say something, a protest on Connor’s behalf, he hopes, although he can’t come up with anything. Luther holds a hand up to stop him. “I know you won’t leave him, and you shouldn’t. I think it’s good that you stay together. But, my family… I just think you should go.”

There are lights on in the house, even this early. They were never turned off. Out front, by the dim glare of the motion sensor burglar light, a narrow figure in an oversized coat is methodically hosing down the bloodied grass—Kara, doing what she does best. There’s a cigarette stuck to her bottom lip, flaring like an aircraft warning beacon in the distance. And there’s her cig dealer, huddled on the steps behind her, flicking a spent drugstore lighter and getting nothing but sparks. Even from here, Connor seems to know Hank is watching, and he lifts one hand and twiddles his fingers in a weird little wave.

“You scared of him?” Hank asks.

Luther hums low in his cavernous chest. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. Hank can almost see him meticulously constructing his next thought in his head before he continues. “It’s like you’ve got a wild animal eating out of your hands.”

“I know what you mean.” Hank scrubs his hands over his face. He needs a weeklong shower. Somewhere, in some distant soybean field, two men are snoring through broken faces, jerking with confused signals from wounded brains. Maybe they’ll wake up, maybe they won’t. Somewhere, there’s a car on fire, and inside there’s a man who’s been pulled to pieces. Hank needs to take steel wool to his bones and bleach his blood.

He waves back to Connor.

 

* * *

 

 The Honey Court Motel sits at a funny bend in the highway where nothing’s really visible except agricultural wilderness on one side and a skeletal woodlot on the other, not even a stoplight to let you know that you haven’t completely driven out of the civilized world. The motel itself—a red and pink Happy Meal toy catering to extramarital activities—looks surprised to be there. Room 29 is set at the elbow of the L-shaped structure, and it might be the quietest place on earth if it weren’t for the neon VACANCY sign affixed to a railing just outside, which is always lit up in screaming toxic pink and humming like incensed wasps performing a Gregorian chant.

20 bucks plus tip gets you terrible champagne delivered to your door in a scummy ice bucket. For six days, Hank has been boiling himself purple in the room’s heart-shaped Jacuzzi and swigging Baby Duck straight from the bottle. He’s starting to feel soft and bloated and loose-skinned and ripe, like some kind of tortured luxury meat product. Beside his head, Sumo drools into a pile of ancient terrycloth bathrobes.

Connor has spent the majority of his time sprawled on the king-size bed, his one remaining foot propped high on the illuminated Lucite headboard, jiggling mildly with the efforts of the elderly Magic Fingers. From there, he just _stares_ , neck cranked back at a godawful angle so he can ogle Hank upside-down.

“What, like what ya see?” Hank raises his half-empty bottle in a toast.

“No,” Connor says, serene and unblinking. “Your face is all red. The chlorine is damaging your hair. You look very weird.”

“Well Jesus, okay, thanks.”

“Would you like me to tell you how many people’s bodily fluids I can still detect in that water?” Connor smiles beatifically.

“I will throw you off the roof again.”

 _Keep your heads down for a bit,_ had been Rose’s insistence when she deposited the key for room 29 into Hank’s palm. _Just until we know the coast is clear._ Hank doesn’t know exactly what sign they’re waiting for, or what they’ll do once they’re satisfied that no one is coming after them. Now Hank has too much time to think and he hates it. What were they doing here? Where were they going? What had this all been about, anyway? He’s having some success scalding the thoughts away in hot water, at least.

“Would it fuck with your circuits and shit if you got in the tub, do you think?” Hank asks, waving a hand vaguely at the roiling water.

Connor shrugs. “Not ordinarily, but it’s hard to say now that my skin has been compromised. It might.”

“Sucks for you, then,” Hank says. “Does a body good.”

“Again, I’d be more than happy to give you a complete inventory of the bacteria present in that water.”

Hank just shuts his eyes and lets his head loll back onto the rim of the tub. He’s slightly dizzy. He doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t slightly dizzy, really. The noise of the bubble jets crowds his brain and he lets himself drift on it for a long time. Sweat runs down his cheeks like tears.

A small wave laps at his chest, and he hoists his heavy head up to see Connor perched on the opposite edge of the tub, pants off, one pale skinny leg stirring the water gently. The neon foil of his Cyberlife underpants shimmers in the fluorescent light. He lifts his leg above the water, wriggles his toes (curiously, as if he’s never seen them before), puts his foot back down. It’s almost easy, watching him like this, to forget that he wrenched a man’s head off with his bare hands not even a week ago.

Hank pulls from his champagne bottle. “Does that feel hot to you? I mean, do you feel temperature?” he asks.

Connor tips his head back, examining the ceiling as if the answer might be written there. “I feel 102 degrees Fahrenheit,” he says. “But I guess that’s not what you mean.”

“So what, you don’t feel hot or cold—like _feel_ it, feel it—ever? At all?” Hank, half out of his mind with booze and hot water, finds himself feeling unaccountably upset by this fact. Angry.

A tremor seems to pass through Connor’s frame, audibly rattling his abused joints with a noise like a bone wind chime. He’s staring through the ceiling into some other place now. “I know what cold feels like,” he says quietly.

 

* * *

 

“We got some new ones yesterday.”

It’s the first time they’ve seen Rose in a week, and they’re still keeping it quiet. They’re sitting in a rest stop food court some twenty minutes from the motel, eating hash browns in the middle of the night. There are roadtrippers wandering around in sweatpants and smelling like bad sleep and granola bars.

“New ones?” Hank takes a careless sip of his black coffee and burns the shit out of his tongue. Across the table, Connor’s hands are clasped around his own cup, purchased for appearances only. He’s watching the steam curling across the dark surface.

Rose leans across the table and flicks her eyes significantly in Connor’s direction. “New ones,” she says. “First since last winter. Nice girls, customer service.”

Hank grunts in mild surprise. “No shit. Sort of figured they’d, you know. Got most of ‘em by now.”

There’s a nervy, electric energy in Rose tonight, making her fingers jump as she pulls an uneaten hash brown apart. “From what I heard last night, not even close,” she says, voice low and feverish. “It’s quiet, but there’s, well, there’s movement again. I suspect we’ll be getting a lot more company soon.” A smile twitches at the corners of her lips. “Milo loves to complain about how busy he is, taking care of people. He’s back in his element.”

Hank digs an elbow into where Connor’s ribs would be, if he had them. “Hear that, killer? All your hard work amounted to fuckall in the end. How’s that for job satisfaction, huh?"

A group of all-night drivers drift by the table, college kids, pop-eyed and pale from staring at lane lines in the dark. Hank and Rose make a show of being deeply engaged in their midnight breakfasts. Connor picks up his coffee and takes a deep, obvious drink, then spits it back out into the cup as soon as the coast is clear again.

“Whenever I think you can’t gross me out more, you come up with something new and innovative,” Hank mutters, shaking his head.

A weird crooked smile creeps up the side of Connor’s face. There’s a rivulet of coffee trickling down his chin. “To your earlier point, Lieutenant Anderson, it’s actually sort of nice to know that no one has succeeded where I failed.”

 

* * *

 

At some point since they took up residence at Honey Court, Connor has stopped being subtle about cuddling up to Hank at night. Once he’s had his fill of chain-smoking on the balcony, he comes in and clambers onto the bed without even bothering to take his one shoe off, bringing a nauseating cloud of new and old cigarette smoke with him. Most nights, he just pushes his forehead into the space between Hank’s shoulder blades, almost hard enough to bruise, and just stays there all night while Hank doesn’t even pretend to sleep.

The nights are peppered with abrupt, startling barrages of conversation. At 3am on Tuesday, Connor jabs Hank’s kidneys with his fingers until he’s sure Hank is listening, then demands to know how much Sumo weighed as a puppy, and does Hank think Sumo remembers Cole?

Thursday at 5am finds Connor kicking the backs of Hank’s calves and informing him that he used to have a garden, casually, as if they’d been talking about this all night. Hank blinds stupidly into the pink neon-stained dark and mumbles, “Oh yeah? Where at?”

“In my head, I guess you’d say. A feature of my software.”

“How about that,” Hank slurs around a yawn.

“It’s gone now.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s your fault. The space for it is still there, but it’s different. I don’t go there anymore.”

Hard, cold fingers prod the nubs of Hank’s spine, half-accusing, half-petting, and he shivers.

 

* * *

 

 

The new girls at Milo’s have the same face, same eyes and all, only one of them has evidently given herself a haircut with a rototiller. ( _She won’t let me fix it,_ Rose lamented over the phone. _She gets very defensive about it._ )

Milo pushes a warm roll of bills into Hank’s hand at the front door—$700 to take the girls the five hours to Montebello in the wee hours of the morning. When Rose called with the offer, some stupid noble part of Hank wanted desperately to refuse the money, no, he’d do it for free, but he was under no illusions that his meager savings would last much longer. It still leaves a film of oily shame over his tongue as he tucks the cash into his jacket pocket.

“Call if anything goes wrong. Anything at all,” Rose says, hovering over Milo’s shoulder, face pinched into anxious lines.

Hank assures her he will, and heads back to his car, accompanied by Luther (ostensibly for help in case of emergencies, but he suspects it’s partially for the girls’ comfort, as well as Milo’s). The girls are already in the back seat, big-eyed and still as startled rabbits. The one with the fucked-up hair is holding tight to the strap of a backpack with one hand and her companion’s arm with the other, gripping her bicep tight as if afraid they might float apart.

The four of them say little for the first hour of the drive, sitting in a silence too preoccupied to be oppressive. Hank steals curious glances at the girls in the rearview mirror and thinks of Connor, left behind in the motel room with Sumo for the night. He wonders if these girls would recognize Connor for what he is, if they would be afraid of him, if they would look at the wreckage of him and think _serves you right._ Hank wonders if these girls—grim and quiet, faces hungry for something more than food—would be _girls_ to Connor now, or still just ones and zeroes.

Turns out, it doesn’t take much to get the girls talking. Maybe being on the run, being suspicious for so long, leaves you aching to connect, Hank supposes. They’re Mindy and Mel—defiant permutations of the Melinda they once shared.

“We’re sisters,” Mindy says, tipping her chin like a boxer, as if daring Hank to argue.

They’ve got third-shift hotel cleaning jobs lined up already in Montebello, thanks to Milo calling in yet another of his seemingly endless connections. Not for the first time, Hank wonders how in the hell a guy who spends most of his professional life with his arm stuck up a horse’s Kentucky Derby manages to cultivate such an expansive underground network.

The weird thing about talking to people who haven’t been people for more than a couple years at most, Hank is starting to realize, is that they’re new to absolutely everything but they tend to form strong opinions immediately. He tells Mel that her hair reminds him of Joan Jett, and she says she’s never listened to Joan Jett, so he plays her a few tracks. She wrinkles her nose and tells him it’s too loud.

Mindy, on the other hand, with her Sunday school bangs, elbows Mel and demands that Hank play more music just like that. Definitely sisters.

Their destination is a squat little house with no light on in the windows or on the front porch, but a tired-eyed woman in a nightdress appears at the door to beckon the girls inside. She to Hank and Luther, and they’re off again without so much as a glance backward.

“I wish we didn’t have to leave them here,” Luther says, and Hank realizes it’s the first time he’s spoken in five hours.

“They’ll be alright,” Hank says automatically, without really knowing if it’s true.

Luther is rigid in his seat, big hands resting neatly on his knees. “Rose thinks there will be more soon. I know they can’t all stay. But it makes me nervous, sending them away where we can’t look after them.”

Hank is struck by a sudden and startling flare of something like affection. He reaches over and pats Luther’s shoulder, and it’s like knotted iron under his hand. “Sorry, man, you can’t keep all of ‘em.”

It’s coming up on noon by the time Hank returns Luther to Milo’s and heads back to the motel. The air above the parking lot is wobbling in the heat, and through the haze he spots Connor, leaning on the railing outside the room, Sumo at his feet.

 

* * *

 

The nightly weight at his back and the stale cigarette stink is becoming, if not comfortable, then at least familiar. Every night, Hank finds himself listening to the drone of the neon sign outside and waiting for the creepy little limpet to climb into bed and adhere himself before he drifts off.

“Alright, come on, you gotta tell me,” Hank says one night as he feels the mattress dip behind him. “What’s with the smoking, huh? You can’t tell me nicotine does anything for robots.”

Connor is quiet for a moment. “No, it doesn’t. Not like that,” he says.

“So what, you just wanna rock that classic homeless pirate John Wayne aesthetic?”

The funny thing about Connor being in such shitty condition is that you can literally hear the wheels turning when he’s thinking hard. “I don’t think you realize how… astronomical my processing capacity is,” he says after a series of irritable whirs and buzzes. “I’m a repository for incalculable amounts of information. I’m a multi-million dollar crime lab, sure, but I’m also the entire staff of crime scene investigators. I’m a whole detective squad.”

“So you’ve taken it upon yourself to smoke enough for a whole detective squad.”

Connor huffs a noise into the back of Hank’s neck, part-sigh, part-laugh, and the hot exhale smells of tar and overtaxed metal. “Tools aren’t designed to deal with downtime, Hank. I’m don’t know how to exist in all the little ordinary moments of a life, and frankly I’m beginning to suspect that I wasn’t supposed to be operational as long as I have. I can never just stop thinking,” he explains in his slowest, most condescending tone of voice. “There are hundreds of ingredients in cigarettes, which produce over seven-thousand chemicals when burned. It gives me something to occupy at least a fraction of my mind, even if for a little while. Otherwise, everything is just… loud, I guess.”

Hank takes a second to turn the explanation over, palming the weight of it in his mind. “I feel like Freud would just absolutely cream himself over you,” he says, and reaches back give Connor’s face a sympathetic pat.

 

* * *

 

 

Kara only visits at dusk, and she and Connor wander the perimeter of the parking lot like tigers testing a weak fence. Somehow, Hank knows these conversations are not for him, and he never asks about it when Connor climbs into bed later than usual.

 

* * *

 

Summer slips away all at once, and by late September the mornings are cold enough that Hank’s car stutters and wheezes for a long moment before the engine turns over.

There have been three nighttime trips since August, three quiet drives to tucked-away places where a new face might go unnoticed, three new photos for Milo’s wall. Connor always stays behind, to watch Sumo, he says, but Hank thinks there’s an unnamable apprehension there.

When there are no passengers, there are other odd jobs that need doing. Shifting spare parts from one location to another, clearing out the raspberry canes when they become too aggressive. The barn needs to be remodeled to hold more guests (it still smells of smoke). Every task completed brings another fistful of bills in from Milo, and mostly, it’s enough.

They’ve relocated to another motel—the Bends, where everything is olive green and wood-paneled. There are white plastic Adirondack chairs outside the door, and they sit there in the evenings when Hank isn’t running some furtive errand. The door faces west, and even the cold of the evenings is broken by the slant of evening light. Sumo has taken to snoozing in a certain line of sun in front of the door, like an old fat cat.

There are two full-size beds in this new room, but one of them has never been used.

In the other bed, Connor whispers to Hank’s spine, “The average life expectancy of a St. Bernard is eight to ten years.”

 

* * *

 

Hank completes his passenger dropoff and gets back to the motel before dawn, and Connor is scrunched into one of the chairs out front, chin resting on his knee, staring directly into the headlights. Hank parks the car, grabs the black liquor store bag from the passenger’s seat and unceremoniously evicts Sumo from the other chair.

“How long would you sit out here like this, if I didn’t come back?” he asks, peeling the wax seal from the top of a whiskey bottle.

Connor just shrugs, lights two cigarettes at once and passes one over to Hank. The filter is dry and tastes of nothing when Hank puts it to his lips. Someone has left the TV on loud in another room, and canned laughter spills out into the dark morning.

“I mean, what’ll you do if I don’t come back one day?” Hank asks before tipping the bottle back to take a deep drink. He swallows, wipes his lips. “If somebody gets me or something. One of those cowboys like at Milo’s, I dunno. What’ll you do?”

Connor smiles blandly at the parking lot. “I don’t think you want to know what I’d do, Hank,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Hank is half-watching a _Sentinel_ rerun stream on TV and trying to punch a new hole in his belt with a blunt screwdriver when Connor clomps out of the bathroom and sits beside him. The screwdriver is jostled out of Hank’s hand, and he grumbles, “Whole goddamn room, perfectly good couch, and you have to sit in my lap.”

Connor has taken to wearing even more layers of clothing, now that the weather has turned. _If you stand still for too long, the AmVets people are going to think you’re a donation and put you in one of their trucks,_ Hank remarked once. The pirate eyepatch is still a constant, though it gets shabbier by the day.

He’s unscrewing the lid from a tube of something, and a wave of old-lady-handbag perfume curdles the air—the complementary lotion from the bathroom, Hank realizes. Connor tucks the lid neatly into his sweatshirt pocket, quirks an eyebrow at Hank, and, in one businesslike motion, squeezes the entire contents of the tube directly into his mouth.

“Jesus, if you’re out of cigarettes you could’ve just asked.” Hank makes a great demonstration of gagging and rolling his eyes. But Connor’s sliding to the floor now, slithering awkwardly to insinuate himself between Hank’s knees, staring up from the shadow of his ratty beanie. There’s lotion all over his mouth, and he looks like something rabid kneeling in mad prayer.

Somehow, Hank still doesn’t quite get what’s happening until Connor abruptly grabs at his crotch, going for the button of Hank’s pants with absolutely no preamble.

Hank snatches Connor’s hands away at the wrists and scoots back. “No, oh no, we’re not doing this again,” he snaps. It comes out sounding like _down, bad dog, don’t eat that barf._

Connor tips his head, smacks lips sticky with lotion and says mildly, “I’d like to try again, if that’s alright with you.” He might as well be talking about the weather. “I figured the lack of lubrication was the problem last time.”

Looking down at this—this lost kneeling thing too shabby for a Dickens novel, stinking of cheap perfumed grandma lotion, one-eyed and angel-faced and capable of tearing a man in half on a whim, this thing he killed and unkilled and refused to let go—Hank swears he can hear the last string tethering him to any kind of solid reality snap audibly. He stands and edges carefully around Connor.

“Stay there,” he sighs, raking a hand through his hair. He leaves Connor there on the floor and goes to the bathroom to fetch a wet washcloth, then returns to the bed to find Connor exactly where he left him. He reaches down and helps Connor scramble onto the bed to sit in front of him, then pushes the washcloth into his hands. “Wipe your mouth out, fuckssake. Why the hell would you think I’d want that shit anywhere near my dick, first of all? I’d probably get a rash or something.”

Connor looks at the washcloth, and shrugs. “I was improvising.” He dabs the lotion from his lips and sticks his tongue out to wipe it down. Hank watches this process in silence, leaning back against the headboard. Connor looks tired. No, exhausted, in a terribly human sort of way.

Hank reaches out and takes the washcloth from Connor’s hands. “Alright, alright. Probably gonna take days to get that smell out anyway. Come here.” It’s an awkward, flailing process, guiding the both of them down to lay on top of the comforter. They lie face to face, stiff as corpses with their arms at their sides and six inches between them that might as well be a mile.

“I just want to…” Connor trails off, staring somewhere to the side of Hank’s ear. Hank wonders where he is right now, if it’s somewhere cold. “I just want,” Connor finishes in a remote whisper that seems to come from another room.

 

* * *

 

Connor’s hands are around Hank’s wrist and his mouth is dry around Hank’s left index finger, the exact temperature of a cold-storage drawer in a morgue. Hank doesn’t remember falling asleep or waking up, but he doesn’t try to take his hand away. Connor’s eyes are closed, and the clicking of his insides sounds like faraway footsteps.

 

* * *

 

Hank likes working on the barn at Milo’s. It’s all clean sawdust and cold beer and Luther’s quiet bulk at his side. Milo’s absolutely useless with any kind of power tool, but he bustles around cleaning up drywall dust and giving unsolicited opinions and generally being inconvenient.

“Even with the extra room, it’s going to be risky, keeping too many people on the property at once,” Milo says, sweeping unnecessarily under Hank’s feet and knocking his ankles with the broom. “Eventually, we’re going to need to spread these folks out some. Get some other properties near the border, maybe. Someplace to go if things go south.”

Even bent to the task of securing door hardware to the frame, Hank can feel Milo’s significant look on the back of his head. “No way, don’t look at me,” he mutters around a mouthful of screws. “The whole reason I left Detroit was so I wouldn’t have to pay property taxes or mow a lawn anymore.”

“I didn’t even say anything,” Milo says airily.

 

* * *

 

The end of September puts another of Milo’s guests—a big man who looks exactly like Luther—in the back seat of Hank’s car. He’s named himself John, and he talks like someone much smaller and lighter and younger. He likes gardening, or, to be more exact, he likes the idea of gardening, as he’s never had the chance to try it for himself. Sumo drools into John’s lap as they drive, kneaded into a puddle by the big man’s careful hands.

John talks about gardens and gardening for the better part of six hours, and from the passenger’s seat, Connor listens and nods, listens and nods.

 

* * *

 

At night, Connor says _I want, I want,_ and Hank is finally ready to translate for him. Connor says _I want_ , and Hank takes his hands and guides them, puts them where they need to go and moves them how he likes, doesn’t even complain when Connor wants to taste and analyze and report. Connor says _I want,_ and Hank digs in his nails, his teeth, hard enough to give restless multi-million-dollar processors something to focus on, enough to keep them quiet. Connor says _I want,_ and Hank says _So do I, so do I._

* * *

 

**November 17, 2040 (one year and forty miles away)**

 

The little girl has red hair, and so does the man holding her hand, and they glow identically in the late afternoon sun. Hank watches them walk up the back stairs to their new apartment with no luggage but each other. Then he drives home.

The little road was probably paved once, but now it’s all treacherous roots and tire ruts deep enough to get stuck in when it rains. You probably wouldn’t see it unless you were looking for it. At the end of the road, a mud-colored house scowls out of a thicket of scrubby old trees.

It’s quiet out here, so quiet it sometimes makes Hank’s teeth hurt.

The only reason the house is still standing is because all the walls seem to be buckling inward at the same time, propping one another up in flagrant defiance of gravity. There’s running water, sure, but you have to let the tap run for five minutes before the water stops coming out reddish and smelling like egg salad. There are mysterious skittering things living behind the crumbling drywall and the exposed beams of the ceiling are hairy with cobwebs that Hank has no intention of ever cleaning.

The whole effect is reminiscent of urban legends, the kind that kids tell each other about faces in windows and bodies in the walls. But the only ghosts here are the ones that Hank packed in the trunk of his car when he left Detroit—a little boy, a make-believe friend, a half-remembered man who used to live in Hank’s mirror.

They often have company, but nobody stays for long. This is an in-between place, just a stop on the way to somewhere else, for everyone but the three of them. Hank doesn’t keep photos like Milo does, but in one of the cabinets in the shitty little kitchen there’s a list of names, so he doesn’t forget.

Sometimes Rose comes by to give Hank hell for the state of the place. Sometimes Connor and Kara sit in silence out front for hours, on the uncomfortable mismatched barstools serving as porch furniture.

It’s getting cold again, and every morning the poorly-sealed windows are frosted on the inside. Hank often complains that it’s no use cuddling up closer to his bedmate, it only makes him colder.

Connor is sluggish in the mornings, cold and drowsy until Hank lights the stove. He can’t regulate his own temperature anymore, and he and Sumo follow warm patches of sunlight as they move across the floor, like a couple of lizards. There are few suitable spare components for someone like Connor, a limited edition, a one-time special event. They scavenge what they can, and Connor trundles along, held together with bubble gum and an endless silent litany of no-whammies-no-whammies.

(“St. Bernards don’t live very long,” Connor said once while he tied a new elastic to his eyepatch for the fifth time.

“That’s alright,” Hank replied, pulling Connor’s beanie down over his eyes just to piss him off. “It’s worth having him while I can.”)

Connor is lounging on the porch steps, bundled in every article of clothing he owns and the quilt from the bed. He seems to be wearing Sumo as a throw blanket. “They’re in the new place?” he asks as Hank walks up.

“Yep. I’d say they need time to get settled but they don’t actually have any furniture, so.”

“Good.” Connor nods. “Honestly, if I had to hear him sing one more adorable Disney song to her, I was going to call in an anonymous tip to the bounty hunters.”

Hank settles onto one of the porch stools to drink his dinner. He’s losing too much weight, he thinks. Not enough shitty takeout around here. He’s always got a headcold, these days. Probably mold in the walls or something. Asbestos, maybe. Sumo abandons Connor to drool all over Hank’s shoe, and Hank digs his fingers into the thick fur of the dog’s neck.

Temporary, he knows. None of them were made to last. But sometimes, on evenings like this when everything is limned with stiff frost and even the sap in the trees seems to be sleeping, the air smells faintly of forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, canada

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to hit me up at everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory.tumblr.com or @flamingo_tooth. thanks for reading!


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